The Wire: Season Four DVDReview

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The best show on television goes to school.

By Christopher Monfette

The goal of this review is not, as one might expect, to convince you to purchase the fourth (and perhaps most effective) season of HBO's critically-celebrated drama The Wire. After all, chances are good that if you're reading these words, you've quite possibly finished the season – or, at the very least, followed some portion of the show itself. Rather, the goal of this review is to convince the few of you who may have – by either accident or happenstance – clicked upon this story without any experience of the show thusfar to go back, season by harrowing season, to the very beginning.

Because at the end of the day, this is not a review; this is a love-letter to television's best drama.

Through four incredible seasons they've called it simply "The Game" – a fitting, if all too ironic, name for the nation's ever-persistent drug culture. Fitting if only because this seemingly senseless trade of powder and pills carries with it a surprising architecture of rules – a code of conduct not without some semblance of honor. It would be easy – and indeed has been easy for a number of less credible, authentic shows – to portray the game as a simple tapestry of lower-class black men and women with second-rate guns and first-rate rims; a stereotypical soundscape of rap music and inarticulate vocabulary.

But in the world of The Wire rap music is poetry and street-slang Shakespearean; the under-educated corner-kids operate with an intelligence in many ways superior to those who sit outside of the game. A round of dice is a math-lesson and murder just another mode of business. The Game plays out within a community which feeds continually back into the white establishment – from the street corners to ports to the oak-paneled walls of the city's politicians. And what The Wire has so brilliantly accomplished is finding a way to thread a simple police procedural through an incredibly complex maze of social interactions, creating an environment in which the coldest of drug lords is as much an everyday businessman as the most cunning of mayoral candidates.

In the fourth season of the show, The Wire turns away from the more epic, brother-vs.-brother focus of the third season to focus on Baltimore's failing school system. Following a group of four children through a single school-year, The Wire is able not only to create compelling drama and fully-fleshed characters, but clearly – and frighteningly – demonstrates how an obvious under-class, a lucrative drug world and an under-funded school system can so dangerously form a virtually unbreakable cycle.

Each of the children who lead our experience throughout the year prove to be not only incredibly fine actors, but equally relatable characters. There are no happy endings here – nor are there particularly happy middles or beginnings – but the push-and-pull between their inherent humanity and the appeal of the thug-life makes it impossible not to invest in their outcomes. Contrasted against the beginnings of the battle against the new generation of dealers – lead by the chilling Marlo Stanfield – the story expertly weaves the children's stories into the larger white-hat / black-hat narrative of the police and their prey.

With the exception of Avon Barksdale, all of your favorite characters are back this year – including an unexpected few from the show's second, less gang-related season – though not all will finish these thirteen incredible episodes intact. This season represents, in many ways, the most pessimistic and cynical stretch of the show, though feels neither overly preachy nor entirely hopeless. If the police story is the who-what-where – and the drug story is the why – the show leaves the troublesome how up to the imagination and conscience of its viewers.

And for that startling mix of social commentary and cop-drama entertainment – bound together by threads of exceptional writing and performance— The Wire has proven itself among the very best television dramas in a long timeline of high-quality programming. And this fourth and penultimate season may just be its best.